SHOW REVIEW: Blonde Redhead
LOCATION: The Metro, Chicago, IL
April 14, 2007

It’s shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the stage on Saturday night. They all showed up, all the young punks with their piercings and tattered vestures, the coffee-shop intellectuals in square-framed glasses and horizontally-striped polos; they poured in from everywhere: Downtown, Uptown, and all the outlying suburbs. They’ve come to watch Blonde Redhead make love on stage.

Kazu Makino steps out before the crowd, her legs bare to the hip beneath the frills of her dress, cerulean blue. She is a modest presence, almost timid behind her keyboard. She is seated on a great, black felt-covered horse that acts as her piano bench while a sampler handles most of her bass-lines. When she leans forward, her face disappears behind the earthy curtain of her hair. When she sings, she closes her eyes. But when she sings... God, when she sings, there’s no hint of modesty there, not the barest modicum of timidity. Her voice knows no diffidence; it reaches into the stratosphere, a trilling alto that gives articulation to the love and loss and confusion of those gathered to bear witness.

She forsakes the security of her alcove only occasionally to take up her bass guitar, as she did on the set openers "Dr. Strangeluv" and “Spring and by Summer Fall.” At times, even, she is not fearful to stand naked before her devotees. Stripped of her instruments during “23” and “Equus,” she surrenders to the siren call of the music. It twists her and shakes her. It takes hold of all the beauty shored within that fragile prison of her ribcage and wrenches it free out into the open air where it can become diffuse with the oxygen and carbon dioxide, where we can all breath it in, suck it down and hold it there, perhaps to retain just a bit of it somewhere at the bottom of our lungs for all the gray days to come.

And what music it is. Amedeo Pace makes the air bleed inside the dense confines of the club. He reaches deep inside the melodies, so well-worn and familiar, and like a diver exploring some new, untrammeled ocean floor, he returns to the surface with fresh and exotic specimens, brightly colored baubles of exquisite loveliness. His brother Simone is on the drums, hammering out the hollow bones upon which the others graft muscle and sinew, flesh and plumage, until the music is a brightly-colored thing, a bird that spreads its wings and enfolds us all.

They do not speak to us while they are on stage. They are aloof, but never cold. They will not patronize us, and do not pretend to be our friends. Were they to meet us outside, they might not even like us. But I have little doubt that, for the eighty minutes they stand before us with their souls exposed, for this time at least, they do love us.

And I tried to make this a concert review. I tried to badger and cajole the words into intelligible, pre-existing patterns, into sentences like “Amedeo Pace, a consummate musician, harnessed his guitar and custom-made effects pedals to tease out every nuance in the band’s intricate chord progressions,” or “Blonde Redhead sounded equally at home with more intimate numbers like ‘Meoldy’--played during their second encore--as it did with tear-the-wall-down thrashers like ‘Melody of Certain Three.’” It’s technically accurate, you can’t question that, but there’s no truth there. And the truth is this: if God has given us any evidence of His existence, it is that human beings are capable of perceiving and giving voice to a beauty outside the order of creation, that three people, not so different from you or me, can make love on a stage in front of a crowd in Chicago, and we can all bask in the afterglow.